Soviet Locomotive Technology During Industrialization, 1928–1952

In the decade before 1914, when public discussion of Russian institutions was relatively free, the railways were a frequent target of abuse. They were said to be incapable of handling the traffic offered by the developing Russian economy and their losses were said to be the biggest drain on the Treasury. In reality the railways had been expanding their work continuously, although the standard of service was not high. Most of the railways, too, by 1914 were regaining the profitability they had lost in the first years of the century.

In Soviet economic history, the mid-1920s are regarded as years of elemental discussion, with economists and Party leaders debating the best route to follow after the relatively easy return to the 1913 levels of production had been achieved. The acceptance of the First Five-Year Plan, which confirmed the USSR on its course of rapid industrialization, did not occur until 1929. Until then, in all parts of the economy, there was an odour of uncertainty, if not of unreality, in policy-forming departments.

The commotion that attended the adoption of the First Five-Year Plan in April 1929 proved to be only an overture; until the Second World War brought new priorities, Soviet life would be dominated by the theme of rapid industrialization. The Five-Year Plan was the most optimistic of two variants proposed, but, even so, during its course it was revised upwards as optimism was multiplied by enthusiasm to produce recklessness and then megalomania. Its first year went well, and at the end of 1929 it was decided that its targets should be achieved in four instead of five years. By 1931 Stalin was talking of ‘the Five-Year Plan in three years’. In the end, when the First Five-Year Plan terminated (nine months short of five years), there had been great increases in industrial output, although these were usually less than the target figures.

‘It’s understandable that we had to give these worthy men a punch in the teeth and politely escort them out of the NKPS adminstration’ was Stalin’s picturesque euphemism for a process which was rather more dire than a mere punch in the teeth.¹ As in Soviet society as a whole, on the railways shrift became progressively shorter as the 1930s approached the 1940s. Stalin was referring to the so-called ‘limiteers’ in the NKPS who, he said, were ejected because they insisted that there was a fixed technical limit to what the railways could carry at a given level of equipment.

When the Civil War ended in 1921 there seemed to be only one urgent locomotive problem in the Soviet Union, the need to restore the locomotive stock to its 1913 level. Designers and researchers could therefore afford an unhurried approach; new passenger locomotives were developed, and the methodical testing of locomotives continued on pre-war lines. During these years a number of younger men, typically engineers who had graduated in the previous decade, took over responsible jobs from those who had died, emigrated, retired, or been dismissed. It was to this new generation that men like Egorchenko and Syromyatnikov belonged; men who, while they seemed to thrive in the new revolutionary society, never abandoned that fundamental characteristic of the pre-war traction specialists, the preference for the theoretical approach and the quest for something better than excellence.